Staging Philosophy: Intersections of Theater, Performance, and Philosophy

10. Infiction and Outfiction: The Role of Fiction in Theatrical Performance

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In‹ction and Out‹ction The Role of Fiction in Theatrical Performance David Z. Saltz According to the online art lexicon ArtLex, what distinguishes “performance art” from “theater” is that “theatrical performances present illusions of events, while performance art presents actual events as art.”1 This conception of theater has a long history, one that we can trace back at least as far as Plato. In particular, the assumption that theatrical performance presents illusory, as opposed to real, events was an orthodoxy in twentiethcentury theory, from the Prague structuralists through existentialism and phenomenology and, most emphatically, semiotics and poststructuralist theory. The standard view is that a theatrical performance is a kind of text whose primary goal is to represent an absent ‹ctional world, and the audience looks past, or through, the real events to the ‹ction. My objective here is to sketch a coherent alternative to this standard view. Speci‹cally, I will argue that it gets the relationship between performance and ‹ction backward . Theater survives in an age of ‹lm and video precisely because the reality of the theater event matters. An audience comes to the theater to experience a real event, to see real, ›esh-and-blood actors perform real actions. Fiction in theater is vitally important, but not as an end unto itself, and not merely as a content that the audience extracts from the performance . Fiction functions as a cognitive template that informs an audience ’s perception of reality on stage, structuring and giving meaning to the actual events that transpire on stage. When ‹ction functions in this way, I call it in‹ction. The account that I will develop here is closely allied to a nondualistic understanding of representation that Wittgenstein initiated with his analysis of “seeing aspects.” After brie›y outlining the dualistic assump203 tions underlying the standard understanding of theatrical representation, I will provide an overview of the nondualistic tradition in the philosophy of art that has grown out of Wittgenstein’s insights, and ‹nally present my own theory in the context of that neo-Wittgensteinian tradition. The Standard View: Theater as a Semiotic Vehicle In Sartre’s play Kean, the prince refers to Edmund Kean as a “shadow,” and Elaine responds: “A shadow? Is Kean then not a man?” “Indeed no, madam,” pronounces the prince. “He is an actor.”2 Not surprisingly, the prince’s remark here echoes Sartre’s own theory of theater. Sartre maintains that the collective act of the imagination that transforms the actor Kean into the character Hamlet negates the real man, rendering him as unreal as the character he portrays. Sartre writes, “The transformation that occurs here is like that . . . in a dream: the actor is completely caught up, inspired, in the unreal. It is not the character who becomes real in the actor, it is the actor who becomes unreal in his character.”3 Theater semioticians adopt a similar position. Marvin Carlson approvingly quotes Peter Handke’s description of the stage as a place where every chair pretends to be another chair, and where even light is brightness pretending to be other brightness.4 According to this view, the events that actually transpire in the theater assume signi‹cance only insofar as they apprise the audience of some other event, often ‹ctional, always absent. The audience looks at the stage in order to look beyond the stage. In performance, actors cease to exist as or for themselves, and become instead the stand-in for an absent and perhaps nonexistent other. Some theater semioticians such as Jean Alter and Andre Helbo have tried to accommodate the actuality of the theater event within their theories of theater. But the basic dualism between the “real” and the “unreal” that underlies Sartre’s theory of theater remains: these theorists still conceive the performance event to be “real” only to the extent that it does not relate to the narrative. The “reality” of the theater event, according to this view, consists of the actor qua actor. When Helen Hunt performed Viola in Twelfth Night at Lincoln Center, Helen Hunt was a real presence in the theater; Viola was not. According to what has become the orthodox view, as a spectator I must choose whether to focus my attention on the real world, which contains Helen Hunt, or the represented world, which contains Viola. These two levels of reality are distinct and cognitively incom204
Staging Philosophy patible. Helbo is...